Brain scan and artificial intelligence could help predict whether OCD will improve with treatment

Washing hands needlessly dozens of times of day. Spending so much time perfecting schoolwork that it never gets turned in.These are typical behaviors for people with obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD, a lifelong illness marked by repetitive thoughts and actions that can seriously impair work performance, relationships and quality of life. OCD is most commonly treated with medication and a form of psychotherapy called cognitive behavioral therapy. Unfortunately, cognitive behavioral therapy does not help everyone with OCD, and the treatment can be expensive and time-consuming.Now, UCLA researchers have developed a way to use brain scans and machine learning — a form of artificial intelligence — to predict whether people with OCD will benefit from cognitive behavior therapy. The technique could help improve the overall success rate of cognitive behavioral therapy, and it could enable therapists to tailor treatment to each patient.A paper describing the work appears in the Feb. 12 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.“If the results of this study are replicated in future studies, the methods we used could potentially give clinicians a new predictive tool,” said Nicco Reggente, a UCLA doctoral student and the study’s first author. “If a patient is predicted to be a non-responder to cognitive behavioral th erapy, clinicians could pursue different options.”Using a functional MRI machine, or fMRI, the researchers scanned the b...

Related Links:

CONCLUSIONS: A relationship between PTSD and hoarding in Jewish Holocaust survivors is conceivable and should be explored to effectively diagnose and care for affected individuals.
PMID: 30430794 [PubMed - in process]

ConclusionsOver 1/3 of children with PANS experienced transient hallucinations. They were more impaired than those without psychotic symptoms, but showed no differences in disease progression. This difference may point toward heterogeneity in PANS. When evaluating children with acute psychotic symptoms, clinicians should screen for abrupt-onset of a symptom cluster including OCD and/or food refusal, with neuropsychiatric symptoms (enuresis, handwriting changes, tics, hyperactivity, sleep disorder) before initiating treatment.

Publication date: Available online 14 November 2018Source: Journal of Anxiety DisordersAuthor(s): M. Prabhavi N. Perera, Neil W. Bailey, Sally E. Herring, Paul B. FitzgeraldAbstractObsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a chronic disease that causes significant decline in the quality of life of those affected. Due to our limited understanding of the underlying pathophysiology of OCD, successful treatment remains elusive. Although many have studied the pathophysiology of OCD through electroencephalography (EEG), limited attempts have been made to synthesize and interpret their findings. To bridge this gap, we conducted a co...

CONCLUSION: The results of this integrative study allow a better understanding of the neural substrates in this OCD subtype, suggesting that the anatomical gray matter characteristics could have an immune origin that might be helpful in patient classification.
PMID: 30428956 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

We examined these relationships in 313 treatment seeking individuals with HD, measuring hoarding severity with the Saving Inventory, Revised and functional impairment with the Activities of Daily Living for Hoarding Disorder (ADL-H). We created a composite social/occupational function variable assessing employment, cohabitation, and marriage. A path analysis was used to assess the relationship between social functioning, occupational functioning, hoarding related functional impairment in activities of daily living, hoarding severity, psychiatric burden, and suicidality in HD. At least one lifetime psychiatric comorbidity w...

CONCLUSION: There was substantial delay in treatment seeking among the anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder patients, particularly those with OCD or SAD. Perception of stress as a cause of OCD prompted treatment seeking, while severity of panic symptoms delayed treatment seeking.
PMID: 30419984 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

TRRAP encodes a multidomain protein kinase that works as a genetic cofactor to influence DNA methylation patterns, DNA damage repair, and chromatin remodeling. TRRAP protein is vital to early neural developmental...

Conclusions: Our data are in line with research suggesting a crucial role of the executive functions impairments in cognitive outcome disturbance of anti-NMDAR encephalitis. We found also behavioral and psychological deficits pointing to a more comprehensive framework of frontal-subcortical dysfunction, in which the NMDA mediated transmission appear to have a role, as suggested by neurobiological, pharmacological, and neuroimaging studies.
PMID: 30418503 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]